Official Phenom Reviews Thread

[Brother Esau]

Why are you always in AMD threads creating havoc? If you despise AMD so much please GO AWAY!

[Brother Esau]

Not looking good at all and memory performance also seems ghetto!

[Periander6]

Why are you always in AMD threads creating havoc? If you despise AMD so much please GO AWAY!

What havoc? He's saying I told you so because he did in fact tell you so. If anything, he was too generous to AMD. This is a Phenom review thread and the reviews are pretty much unanimous, Phenom sucks.

[Shintai]

Why are you always in AMD threads creating havoc? If you despise AMD so much please GO AWAY!

No, I dont. But unlike a few I tend to use reality.

This is mainly a hype that is busted..again. Some people failed to understand that even after Barcelona. What did you expect? A miracle chip made in the hands of god to counter all logic?

So pack your silly "Waah waaah AMD hater havoc blabla". I still buy AMD on the corporate desktop yet I could buy Intel if I wanted. Because unlike you I dont have unrealistic expectations! I bet the blaming of the company is soon to follow as usual...by the fanboys on your end.

[STEvil]

Given the number of configuration options found in the threads going on in the AMD section I wonder what kind of impact northbridge (HTT) speed has on overall performance.. among other things.

Can only really wait and see..

[JumpingJack]

Why are you always in AMD threads creating havoc? If you despise AMD so much please GO AWAY!

I must agree with Periander and Shantai on this one.... there have been a few strong voices saying ... it's not going to hold water... he was right.

There is nothing wrong in pointing out that the data would support one to see past the 'SPEC2006fp_rate' and understand that the client performance would come up short.

[YukonTrooper]

Nope not at all. Looks like AMD will be Intel's b*tch for at least one more year. Thnx for all the big talk AMD, I honestly thought you might have had an ace up your sleeve. Looks like your delayed launch should never had launched at all. Looks like my money is going to Intel once again.

[Brother Esau]

Shintai.....you're a smart dude and I am not denying that you are wrong about this but you do like to stir the sh**t and that is a Fact!

[Kingcarcas]

Not regretting pulling the trigger on the E4500

[metro.cl]

Ouch!!!

[GreatWhiteHope]

From Bannitt:

Let’s Just Say It


It has been a long road for the computer enthusiast that looks to AMD for solutions. If you are an “Intel guy” and don’t look to other brands for computing solutions the last year has been good to you, and it looks like the next year will be even better. There is no other way to put it; I am disappointed in AMD’s Phenom. The Phenom is nine months late to market and has a hard time keeping up with Intel’s Core 2 processors when it comes to a clock to clock comparison. While you can cherry pick a suite of benchmarks that might give a Phenom to Core 2 comparison a good look on a clock to clock basis, the fact is Intel has better instructions per clock and better scaling than AMD’s Phenom. All that talk from AMD about “clock rate does not matter,” just went out the window all of a sudden. Clock rate today means a lot. I have said for months now to AMD that if it did not launch at least at 3GHz it would have a failure on its hands. Today AMD comes out with 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz Phenom processors. Gone are the 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz parts it wished to be shipping at launch due to a TLB (translation lookup buffer) L3 errata issue. All this is being fixed by AMD, but it means lower clocked processors for now as the TLB issue pops up at 2.4GHz+. Undoubtedly today AMD is going to lose a lot of fans and a lot of folks that have been waiting patiently to be impressed by Phenom are going to throw in towel and move upgrade paths to Intel. But while it is a bad situation, there are some good things to be panned out of the muck.

[JumpingJack]

This is the part that really sticks out for me:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3153&p=3

AMD knew it wouldn't be able to trounce Core 2 with Phenom, especially not at 2.3GHz, so it wanted to control the benchmarking that was done on Phenom. For the first time in as far as I can remember, AMD wanted all benchmarking on Phenom to be done at a location in Tahoe, of course on AMD's dime. AMD would fly us out there, we would spend a couple of days with a pre-configured system and we'd head home to write our stories.

Validates this story:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...-spider-launch

[Methylphenidate]

Here's the Hardware Canucks Preview. Apparently they threw this together in 3 days....

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...e-preview.html

[Boschwanza]

Unlocked GP-9600 at retail price ?

Black and Unlocked

Second, the enthusiast has been promised a “Black Edition” Phenom right out of the gate. Given the Phenom’s performance levels, we petitioned AMD heavily to deliver an unlocked Phenom to the enthusiast and they have listened. AMD knows the current Phenom is not going to feed the enthusiast needs if it is locked. I see this unlocked 2.3GHz Phenom as a huge olive branch being extended to the computer hardware enthusiast community. From our experiences, it should be fairly simple for any user to get their 2.3GHz Phenom running at a respectable 2.8GHz, 2.9GHz, or 3GHz on the right 790FX motherboard. In order to show support for the computer hardware enthusiasts AMD is pricing these unlocked 2.3GHz Phenoms at the same price as the regular 2.3GHz Phenom. There will be no pricing penalty implemented by AMD for the unlocked CPU. The first unlocked CPUs will likely not carry the “Black Edition” branding but will be likely have a sticker on the box to identify the contents.

[savantu]

I find this pathetic , more so the fans who refuse to see the reality.Such practices on behalf of Intel would have filled the forums with TBs of posts , yet for AMD they keep silent.

First Tunisia, then Tahoe?

As a slightly off-topic but important sidenote, I thought it would be appropriate to let everyone know how AMD wanted this review to happen, and how certain folks within AMD were champions for the right cause and made it actually happen.

AMD knew it wouldn't be able to trounce Core 2 with Phenom, especially not at 2.3GHz, so it wanted to control the benchmarking that was done on Phenom. For the first time in as far as I can remember, AMD wanted all benchmarking on Phenom to be done at a location in Tahoe, of course on AMD's dime. AMD would fly us out there, we would spend a couple of days with a pre-configured system and we'd head home to write our stories.

Now I championed for this sort of early-access to Phenom months ago. I've visited AMD alone three times this year primarily to talk about Phenom, and each time I left without being able to report so much as a single benchmark to you all (everyone remembers those articles right?). I tried and tried to get AMD to part with some early Phenom data, because they were losing the confidence of their fan base and that's a sad thing to see for a company that really took care of this community when we needed it most.

After Tahoe AMD would eventually sample Phenom parts so we could test in our own labs, but there was no word on exactly when that would be. Chances are you would've seen a handful of numbers here today if we had gone to Tahoe with a full review of the chip hitting sometime in December.

Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I refused to go to Tahoe.

Don't get me wrong, a free trip to Tahoe is a wonderful thing, but Phenom deserved better. It deserved dedicated testing, it deserved a thorough review, not a quick glance over a couple of days. And I had a feeling that you all would agree. The time for AMD-sanctioned testing expired months ago, if Phenom was launching this week, we were going to have a proper review of it.

These days, AMD seems to be learning a little too much from the ATI way of doing things. If AMD had its way, today's Phenom review would have been done from beautful Lake Tahoe, on a system that AMD built, running at a frequency that isn't launching. Now there's nothing wrong with allowing us to preview Phenom under closed conditions, after all, Intel does it, but that's simply not acceptable for a review of a product that's four days away from being in stores. You all want to see a thorough review of Phenom, not some half-assed preview, definitely not after waiting this long for it.

A representative from AMD's PR agency in charge of the Tahoe trip asked me, somewhat surprised, "what, Intel doesn't work like this?".

Sorry to say, Intel doesn't. Today Intel let us preview the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor, do you want to know how they did it? The FedEx guy dropped off a chip. No flights to Tahoe, no hotel rooms, no expenses at all. Don't get me wrong, I felt like an idiot turning down a free trip to Tahoe, but it was for AMD's own good. We've all seen the financials, these aren't times to be wasting money on silly trips around the country, it costs less than $30 to ship a CPU and that's all we need.

I get the point of Tahoe, it's to control the benchmarking, making sure we wouldn't be comparing a 2.4GHz Phenom to a 3.0GHz Penryn, but honestly folks - would we really do that to begin with? And I get the idea to wine and dine the press, with hopes of more pleasant reviews with better relationships - but this isn't a product to toy with. We're here to do our jobs and that is to review the product that will carry AMD for the next twelve months, and honestly we can't do that from some lodge somewhere away from our testbeds.

This isn't the first time AMD has heard of this from me, and there are many within AMD who feel the same way. The reason you're finding this rant in here today is because I am concerned for the future of the company. Competition is a good thing, we need to keep it around, but AMD needs to learn from its competitors. Intel and NVIDIA don't try things like this, business is always first with them, frivolous pleasures come next.

To AMD: if you want to be Intel, start acting like it.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3153&p=3

[Brother Esau]

So whats the long and short of this? No overclockability beyond 2.4ghz without suffering Errata side affect?

[JumpingJack]

I find this pathetic , more so the fans who refuse to see the reality.Such practices on behalf of Intel would have filled the forums with TBs of posts , yet for AMD they keep silent.





http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3153&p=3

Yep.

[grimREEFER]

This is the part that really sticks out for me:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3153&p=3



Validates this story:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...-spider-launch

even if they overclocked the phenom at lake tahoe, wouldnt it still be craptacular compared to the intel cpus?

[savantu]

790 vs. X38 in HDD, USB and Firewire :

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=10427&page=13

The winner is ....X38.

[JumpingJack]

even if they overclocked the phenom at lake tahoe, wouldnt it still be craptacular compared to the intel cpus?

Even at Tahoe it was 'craptacular':

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_phenom_preview/

Interestingly enough, all of AMD’s Phenom CPUs were running at 1.3V; that’s a little bit higher than AMD’s 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz Phenom CPUs, which run between 1.1-1.25V. I took a stab at overclocking my Phenom rig but got a BSOD before hitting 2.35GHz. For overclocking purposes AMD directed all of us towards one specific PC in the back of the room. Apparently all the other systems had very limited headroom for overclocking, as no one seemed to be able to push their system very far.

This pretty much validates all the data and 'poor' overclocking leaks we got from epreview.com, and others.

[gillll]

might be rev 2 of cpus that are ocable?

after all we saw the amd overdrive with quad on 3ghz. so how noone has that kind of cpu ?

[Shintai]

I just hope those marketing tactics leaves with Hector...

[Shintai]

might be rev 2 of cpus that are ocable?

after all we saw the amd overdrive with quad on 3ghz. so how noone has that kind of cpu ?

You can always have 1 of a 1000 that can and cherry pick it.

I´m sure Intel could find a Yorkfield that could perhaps run 4.5Ghz on air. But it would be very very long from actual product...

[grimREEFER]

We'll obviously revisit the QX9770 once we have production silicon

doesnt anand me production halfnium?

[Omastar]

This is quite sad. My AMD stock is gonna get plundered worse than western Europe in the early Middle Ages.